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The 5 Core Memes by Oracle

Oracle of Sweden‘s post regarding Memetics (pronounced MEEMS, rhythms with “dreams”) was fascinating. In this post I will try to articulate the main points of his new theory. I encourage you to read his original posts on the “Oracle of Sweden” blog, as his flow of ideas and memetics are best understood there. However, as a homework assignment for myself, I have listed his 5 core Memes here:

“A meme is defined to be a unit of cultural information: a belief, an idea, a norm, a principle, a piece of knowledge, etc. In this post, I want to give you an intuitive feeling for why memes are not only important in the context of PU, but the essence of it. Then, in later posts, I will go deeper into the details.

If you have little experience with girls in clubs, rejection may condition you negatively. Depending on your other memes, you may be conditioned to avoid a particular type of girls, the place where you were rejected, or at worst, girls all in all. Memes such as the abundance mentality are powerful because they override this mechanism, but only once they are installed into your mind. What we may need first, is the positive side of conditioning: to get results, which reward our minds, makes us feel more alpha, and as we do start getting something that looks like an abundancy of girls, well, we might actually feel an abundancy of girls too. Good looking people tend to become naturals, because they get such positive treatment from girls throughout their adolescence. The naturals that don’t look good, as you may have noticed, are simply not affected by rejection (because if they were, they would never have become natural to begin with)…

So the idea is simple: install the memes you want, condition yourself by attaching emotions to them, and enjoy your new powers”

“FMI’s paradox is this: you learn game because you want girls. To get girls, you learn that you shouldn’t care too much about girls. So you stop caring about girls…but for what reason? Well, so that you can have girls. But…in order to have girls, you can’t care about girls! It’s a memetic paradox, and I believe the reason why so many guys never get good “inner game” is because of this core inconsistency. With the paradigm I’ve presented to you, FMI’s paradox doesn’t appear to begin with, because you should care about girls. You should give them attention, interest, and sometimes love. And you should never compromise your own beliefs and principles while doing so. Girls become an important element of your life, but they could never consume nor dictate it.”

“As a perspective on life, they are all general and have profound implications for interpretation, decision making, and behavior. The core five perspectives are: existential duality, mindfulness, the principles of choice and respect, success isolation, and core stability. ”

Existential Duality

“An enormous amount of people’s disagreements are based on one sole difference in perspective. In turn, it leads to different interpretations, decisions, and behavior in everyday life. The perspective amounts to whether we relate the world to our subjective, personal experience of it, or whether we analyze it objectively, as an outside observer….

The way out is not to make a compromise between the two (as previously mentioned, this adds nothing new), but to be able to quite fully switch between them when appropriate. Here, “appropriate” refers to personal fitness: when you need to analyze, take the logical perspective. When you need to relate on a personal level, take the emotional perspective.”

Mindfulness

“The past cannot be changed, you can only learn from it. We can and should learn from it by analyzing it. We should take a logical perspective on past events. Never regret the things you’ve done: learn from your mistakes, but don’t let them put you down. What can’t be changed doesn’t matter, and the past is a perfect example of something that can’t be changed. Again,
the past should be analyzed with logic.

The future can only be predicted (correctly or incorrectly). We should plan our future using a logical perspective, based on our emotional preferences.

So when I am writing to you here, I am mainly in logical mode because I’m analyzing my past experiences and current knowledge. Be sure however, that I am in emotional mode when kissing a beautiful girl or having sex. When something feels good, I am in emotional mode. When something ought to feel bad, I am in logical “protected” mode. And sometimes they can be mixed: when I lost my old LTR, one of the most important people in my life, I was happy thinking about how much more freedom this would give me to reach new heights in my development. At the same time, I logically understood that the price I had to pay for this growth was the ties that bound us. She could not understand why I didn’t share her agony, but now you do: it is because I felt the positive emotions and understood the negative consequences.

The principle of Choice
states that you should always embrace peoples choices of investing in you. This is much stronger than simply accepting other people’s choices: acceptance is passive, embracement is active, you are actively giving the other person the choice: you or not you.

The principle of Respectstates that you should show people your social rules (principles), and find out theirs. If they are too incompatible, compromise is not the solution. Instead, you move on, knowing it wasn’t meant to be. And as long as there is compatibility, escalation can take place.

Discovering means taking things for what they are: some people will love you, others will hate you, and that is something you will appreciate.”

Success Isolation [credit: Yusha.p]

“You have a personality, filled with things that people may like and dislike. Do we have strengths and weaknesses, that is, can we really talk about some things being bad and others good? We can, if we choose to view our memes in terms of good and bad. We tend to do so for sure, but should we? It depends on the purpose.

We should never use our previous accomplishments, or our current successes, as an ego booster to achieve our future goals. Using the fact that you’ve closed a hundred girls may sound like a good idea to reduce your AA and feel confident during your next approach. The problem is simple: this prediction is as incorrect as it could be. In practice, boosting your confidence through good emotions from previous experiences has the exact opposite effect: it gives you more AA and hesitation!

This is because when you stimulate yourself based on previous success stories, you are tricking your mind into believing it has achieve an enormous amount of success, hence boosting your ego (remember what I’ve previously mentioned about the research on confidence due to Barkow?). With confidence built on your previous successes, your mind now feels that you are on top. It then becomes a terrible idea to take further risks considering the expected payoff: If you succeed with the next girl, you will only confirm what others already believe to be true: that you are a ladies man. On the other hand, if you fail, they will be disappointed, and your status will diminished. Since your confidence is built on this perception of status, it too will be decreased (again, by Barkow). The fear of status loss translates into fear of rejection, and there you have AA. You’ve lost before you’ve even begun.

This leads to the somewhat counter-intuitive realization that we can never let our long term well being (e.g. confidence, state) depend on our past achievements. We must go back to simplicity: the realization that each girl is a separate situation, that the one in front of you right now has nothing to do with the girls you had yesterday.”

Core Stability

“As pointed out earlier, your core memes have to match each other. Inconsistencies disrupt the stream of consciousness, because it causes confusion. It makes us wonder what choices to make in situation that would otherwise be trivial? Confusion arises because of an internal conflict of will: some memes emotionally pull you in one direction, others in another. The less suchinconsistencies, the less internal conflicts, the less confusion. We become more decisive, and feel more complete.

The immediate implication of this realization is that you can’t squish every meme out there into your brain. Guys that are into self development are especially open minded when it comes to new ideas, making them prone to try out pretty much any meme out there. Critical thinking is low or non-existent, requirements for truth and even usability are preferably but anything will do in the hope of achieving something. With this point of view, you become memetically desperate.”

The Meme Sceptic Meme

“The solution is to install the “meme sceptic meme”, which states the following:

Whenever you encounter a meme, carefully consider the effects this meme will have on you based on your current memetic core. Assume that a new meme could be harmful until proven otherwise. That they spread fast, meaning that many people have it, is no proof of being it being a “nice” meme. It only means that the meme is good at replicating itself.

You invest in your memes by thinking about them. The more you analyze them, the more you will feel them, the more convicted you will become.

An ever better way is to spread and discuss them with others. The more you are mentioning your memes to others, bringing it into discussion, the more invested you become in your memes.

This is how we consciously create more compliance for our memes, which is my definition of meme installation. But how do we become attracted to memes in the first place?

If you have understood everything so far, I am now ready to synthesize this into the installation algorithm. Let us say you encounter a new meme X.

Get a logical understanding for X (by logically interpreting it).

Associate X with your memetic core. How does X fit with the rest? Together with your core, what are the new implications?

Identify past experiences you’ve had in which X may have been relevant.

Visualize how you behave with X in hypothetical (but common) situations.

Identify live situations in which X is relevant (e.g. in the field). Analyze the practical consequences of X: How did it affect your emotions? And consequently, your behavior? If X is a perspective: try out some of the principles implied by the perspective.

Finally, having X nicely installed, relax and enjoy! X is now naturalized into your core.

Where does the meme sceptic meme come into play? I have omitted it from the installation algorithm above. The screening process comes in during each step. Compare with the above, and add the following intuitive rejection principle:

Reject X if self inconsistent.

Reject X if it’s inconsistent with your own core or if it would become destructive.

Reject X if it has been destructive and there’s no reason to believe it would do better now (it can only do better if your core has changed).

Reject X if you can’t see yourself being congruent with X. If you say “no that’s not me”, then this meme is not for you.

Reject X if, after a repeated number of experiences, this meme does you no good.

Repeated tests on X according to step 5.

The meme has now been accepted. The meme sceptic meme is now turned off.

See above.

In other words, step 1-6 are both installation and control measures, where the meme is rejected when it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do (in the sense discussed above). Step 7 is about strenghtening the meme (fully installing it). Step 8 is about letting go of your conscious behaviors surrounding the meme: get used to it being a natural part of you.”

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